Pelmeny

Pelmeny – a Siberian dish of small pockets of dough filled with seasoned, minced beef, lamb, or pork and served boiled, fried, or in a soup.

I first heard of pelmeny about a year ago. A family friend was teaching English at a Russian university and received so many questions about what he was eating that he posted a short video series on his blog of him preparing his favorite meals. The final episode was dinner; the entree - pelmeny. In fact, he liked it so much that he wanted to figure out a way to export it to the US once he left Russia so he could still eat it!

I showed the episode to my friend Clarissa, who studied in Russia for a semester in college. She vividly remembered eating pelmeny and wished she could enjoy this Russian comfort food once again. We decided then and there to be on the lookout for a Russian grocery store so we could buy some pelmeny. She could eat it again, and I could see for myself why she and Daniel loved this little filled “dumpling” so much.

“There’s a Russian grocery store!” I exclaimed as my parents and I drove to church on a Sunday morning several weeks ago. Just a few blocks north of my parents’ house on the corner of a little strip mall was a Russian and European grocery store. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? “We should go there,” I continued. “We need to see if they have pelmeny.”

Monday afternoon before I left Lincoln for Des Moines, Mom and I stopped at the grocery store. Shelves lined the perimeter of the small room. Large burlap bags of something, I am assuming a grain of some sort?, sat piled on the floor in the center of the room. A small upright freezer stood against another wall. A tall, broad shouldered woman came out of the back room and greeted us. Her thick accent strongly suggested that she was indeed Russian, and I assumed she was also the store owner.

Mom and I began looking at all the bottles, cans, and boxes – clearly labeled in Cyrillic. We could figure out what most things were either by the bright picture on the front or the bits of food we could see in the glass jars around the labels. “We have to buy something you know,” Mom said. I was crossing my fingers they’d have pelmeny. “Oh look! There’s the box juice that Clarissa raves about. I wonder which was her favorite,” I said.

We finally made our way around to the freezer and there, filling one entire section were the bags of pelmeny. There was veal pelmeny and beef pelmeny. Hmmm…I wonder which the most popular kind is, I thought.

“Sorry I am out of pork pelmeny,” the woman said. “It should be in Wednesday night.” Pork - that must be the most popular then. Not having until Wednesday to buy any, I settled on veal and took it up to the counter to pay. The woman was in the middle of a boisterous conversation on the telephone – all in Russian of course, so I glanced at the bags of bread and little cooked pastries on the counter.

“Sorry about that,” she said, hanging up. She rang up my pelmeny. “Do you know how to cook this? You take it and” she started banging the frozen bag against the edge of the counter to break up the pieces! I am sure I must have looked quite surprised and startled.

“I am going to make it with a friend who lived in Russia for a while.” I managed to get out. “I think there are instructions on the bag too.”

She stopped hitting the bag on the counter and slid it into another sack, taking my money and clinking it into the cash register. “Thank you and enjoy!” she said as Mom and I left.

Two days later Clarissa and I had our biweekly cooking night. Pelmeny and tiramisu were on the menu. She was thrilled we were having pelmeny. We carefully read the instructions, boiled the water, dumped in the pelmeny, stirred until the little pelmenies floated to the top of the water, and then cooked them for twenty minutes.

Although not a soup per se, Clarissa dished the little puffs into bowls with some of the broth. The traditional way to eat pelmeny was with sour cream, which seems to be a staple of most Russian soups, and dill. Not sure of what to expect, I scooped up one pelmeny and slid it into my mouth. The dough casing was thicker than ravioli. Suddenly, hot broth and peppered seasoned veal filled my mouth as the pelmeny broke open. “Hot, it’s hot.” Clarissa warned, waving her hand in front of her mouth. I nodded; it was soooo tasty.

“Now imagine eating this when it’s freezing cold outside and you’ve been working in an old cathedral turned car factory all morning,” she said when she could talk again. I could understand why she ended up loving it so much. As we ate one pelmeny after another, Clarissa reminisced about other times she’d eaten pelmeny in Russia, and we planned our trans-Siberian railroad trip that we dream of taking someday when we are famous and someone will pay us to go write a book about our experience.

When Clarissa and her husband were coming and going from Colorado two weekends ago, they stayed with my parents, and my mom bought several bags of pelmeny to have for Clarissa to bring back to Des Moines with her. And now, I think, a trip to the Russian and European Grocery store will become a mandatory stop on any and all trips I take to Lincoln.